Holy cow, film makes ag folks have a cow

Cloned calf near Canyon, not your grandpa's food. There's a lot to think about these days and plenty of choices to make. And all around us people telling us what's best

Chipotle's most recent marketing move has some in agriculture hopping up an down like Yosemite Sam, complete with steam coming out of their ears.

A blogger at Drovers CattleNetwork called it "Chipotle’s most recent YouTube slap in the face to farmers and ranchers."

I watched it and don't see it quite that way. Yes, it does say fresh might be preferable to highly processed food, but duh.

Not everybody can get something like Chipotle's (such as here in Amarillo where there isn't a location for hundreds of miles). But that doesn't mean you have to eat "mechanically separated chicken meat" like in Vienna sausages. There are always choices.

This is how the blogger describes the video.

"Cattle, chicken and pigs are run on conveyor belts in a factory straight into a machine that liquefies them before turning the slurry into a more recognizable cut of meat. Other chickens can be seen given a shot with a syringe that instantly makes them balloon up. Dairy cows are milked in boxes stacked on top of one another in a dark building."

Hello, it's just an exageration to make the point that Chipotle thinks its way is a better way. But really, nobody can seriously dispute agriculture could feed the world's population doing things the way they were done a century ago.

While many people are lucky enough in America to be able to make food choices based on all kinds of things from ethics to just taste, a lot of them choose stuff like Twinkies. How much more processed can you get?

Lighten up ag men and women. You're farming and ranching isn't really in all that much jeopardy. There are some aspects about finishing animals or breeding grain varieties that could use a second look. We should always be policing ourselves. But fear not the fast food vendor.

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